Attachments may be sent along with a message (e.g., email message) to a recipient of the message. The attachment may include information that cannot be included in the message or may provide information in a format that is different from the format of the message. Examples of attachments that can be sent with messages include documents and images.
The attachments may be sent together with the message or a link to the attachment may be provided with the message. The link to the attachment provides the recipient of the message an option to select whether the attachment is downloaded. For security, these links are made valid for a set period of time. If the user does not download the attachment during the set period of time the user may not be able to download the attachment. Because the users do not always download the attachments immediately using the link or because it may take a long time to download the attachment, for example due to network bandwidth or the size of the file, the period of time set in the link may expire before the attachment is downloaded.